Author: James

Who would have thought sharing an image on social media could be so complicated. After all the particulars, it appears that it boils down to using 1024×512 for horizontal images, and 800×1200 for vertical images.

It surely helps to scale and crop your images to the perfect size for each social network, but the bottom line is that if you share compelling images (or pictures of Kim Kardashian’s ass), people will click and open the full size image anyway.

Ever wonder how some “designers” can afford to sell logos for $5? Surely they spend hours upon hours concepting, and even more choosing the fonts, colors, etc., right? The image above, What kind of logo do you get for $5, should explain everything.

And that’s what you as a legitimate designer are up against. Some hack who buys a $1 piece of pre-made logo clip-art and sells them (probably to multiple companies) for $5 after what is probably 2-minutes of “design work.” When you look at it that way, you can see how these people actually do make money.

What I find sad is not the fact that someone would pull this type of money-making stunt, but that there are so many companies that fall for it. They willingly accept pre-made clip-art as the visual “face of their company.”

With just a little bit of searching about this movie, I saw quite a few sites pointing to the full length HD movie online. I haven’t watched it because it requires a (free) registration to a site which, let’s be honest, is not a legal movie site. The only reason I even share it is that I came across it searching for the trailer on YouTube and they have the link right there.

I came across this article the other day and paused for a few moments to think about the Adobe empire. The discussion in the article is all-too-familiar, and becoming a real trend. Even I have a difficult time defending Adobe.

I’ve spent years defending Adobe’s business model and applications. I still feel they’re the best tools on the market for content creators. And I don’t feel like $50 per month is the outrageous amount people make it out to be.

But I’m done defending Adobe. Because I can’t anymore.

Without going into a whole lot of detail, the logos and images for the last three freelance jobs I’ve worked on, and the graphics for this site’s last several posts were edited with an app not named Photoshop or Illustrator.

I guess what I’m saying is, the little things I mentioned a few days ago are piling up. And there are finally real options out there. By the end of this year, they’ll be a competitive alternative to Adobe’s print-related suite of apps. All of them. And I’m going to give them a serious consideration.

If you installed Apple’s latest beta of OS X, El Capitan, you may have noticed the LCD appears to be a bit brighter with less contrast. I didn’t notice a problem until I launched Diablo III and found that it was almost unplayable due to the screen brightness.

After tinkering, I realized that El Capitan has added an option in the Display preferences that allows your Mac to automatically adjust the display based on ambient light. Turning this option off (unchecking) fixed my screen brightness issue.

Because this is an iMac, in an office where I control the lighting, this is probably optimal. However, I haven’t installed the beta on my MacBook Pro, so I’m not sure if the new feature offers benefits to mobile users.

Hey Adobe, see that button down there in the lower right corner of your highly-annoying Welcome screen that pops up every time I launch InDesign CC 2015—the one that says “Don’t Show Welcome Screen Again?” How about you fix whatever bug that tells the app to ignore the fact that I clicked that button the last time I launched the app, EVERY TIME I LAUNCH THE APP!!!

When you do manage to fix the bug, please share your findings with the Illustrator team, because it happens every time I launch that app as well.

To be fair, this only happens on two out of the three Macs I use on a regular basis. But all three Macs have exactly the same software installed, and are running the same OS versions.

Digital Photography School has put together a fantastic collection of links for their best articles on macro photography. If you’re a photography hobbiest, it’s well worth browsing through the articles.

Adobe Creative Cloud’s Libraries feature allows you to access, organize and share assets between your desktop and mobile apps, as well as other Creative Cloud users.

Libraries allows you to collect Character Styles, Color Swatches, Brushes, Graphics, Text, and other objects in one or multiple libraries (see the Illustrator Libraries panel in the image above). The Panel is accessed under the Window menu in Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator. The assets you collect are synced via the cloud, and made available not only to your other apps, but you can share them with other members of your creative team, or make them publicly available via a link.

That alone would be really handy, but Adobe went a step further by offering the option of placing graphics in your Library as a linked file. That means when you update the original graphic, it gets updated in your Library, as well as any document you’ve placed the graphic in via the Libraries panel.

For the most part, you simply drag items into and out of the Libraries panel. Some icons across the bottom of the panel also allow you to add items.

Using the Libraries feature can save you a lot of time, especially if you use the same graphics, text styles and colors in most of your design work. In particular, publication designers will find Libraries to be a real game changer, especially if you share the design duties with other graphic artists on the staff.

The movie itself looks good, but Michael Fassbender just doesn’t fit. I don’t care how good he is as an actor, he doesn’t look anything like Steve Jobs. And that would be ok were it not for the fact that Jobs only passed away a few years ago. He’s too fresh in our mind.